Bankers Group Roll Out Fraud System After Hacking

Columbia, SC (WLTX) -- Lawmakers are still doing their own investigating into the data breach that put the personal information of nearly four million South Carolinians at risk.

A South Carolina House committee heard from the inspector general, and deputy director of the department of revenue Thursday afternoon.

Lawmakers also heard from the South Carolina Bankers Association, which represents about 90 percent of banks in the state.

The group said it has developed an early detection system that could help stop fraudulent account transactions that might come from the hacking.

The system would kick in when a client reports an unauthorized transaction to their bank.

"That bank could then immediately report it to all other institutions and if there's similar transactions coming in to all of the banks, they can immediately stop it and go back and test and see if there was any that had come in in the past," said association President and CEO Fred Green.

According to Green, the organization went to court to get member banks access to the 3.3 million bank accounts impacted by the breach.

He says of that number about 2.1 million account were in South Carolina, but only about 1.1 million were active accounts. He says those account have been flagged by member banks.

To date, he says the association has no knowledge of unauthorized transactions that have come as a result of the DOR hacking, but doesn't know that the group would ever be able to attribute such a transaction to the breach.

He says the fraud detection system will launch at the end of the month.